


To Beat the Devil

by thesunlitmaid



Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: ADVENTURE!!!, Folk Songs - Freeform, Gen, is he supernatural or is he not, we just don't know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 21:50:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20495894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesunlitmaid/pseuds/thesunlitmaid
Summary: His spirit cannot be killed. Try to cage him, and he will coax the locks open with a song. Try to burn him, and he will turn into steam and live in the air. Try to bury him, and he will rise up and stroll away from his grave, the roses at his tombstone serenading his every step. His spirit is the breath of life, the song in your heart; he lives in the sublime expanse of stars above, just as he lives in the humble little dandelion that has cracked the concrete on a city street. He is hope itself, and no one can steal his song away.





	To Beat the Devil

There were a lot of stories folks told about him.

There were some that said he was an angel, charged to drift around the world in search of the worthy, to test their hearts and weigh their souls against a whole scroll of sins. Should he be offered the tiniest scrap of bread from the poorest man in town, that man would be gifted with some great and secret knowledge, and he would find his burden eased greatly for his kindness. Yet, should the richest man refuse to so much as lock eyes with him on a street corner, that man would have nightmares the rest of his life, haunted by strangely pale eyes and a dark, looming figure in a glittering cloak of stars…

But that might or might not have been true.

There were some that said he was something much older, timeless, something that had come into being when the first man created the first music, a being of air and song and starlight; he was the spirit of the song, and no matter the song, he was the human truth at the center of it, the heart and the light, and where music was, he always was, from the sore fingers plucking the strings of the battered guitar held by a street-corner busker all the way up to the sold-out arenas pumping out pounding music amidst thousands of screaming and singing fans.

But that might or might not have been true.

And there were some yet that said he was simply a man, nothing more and nothing less, a mere drifter wandering the earth for all his restless days with only his shadow standing beside him, and that someday, he would be swallowed up by the earth just like the rest of us, and not a lot of people would miss him, because no one cared to miss those who were lost and adrift.

But that might or might not have been true.

He had drifted down old 66 over the slow and meandering months. Sometimes he walked, the sun beating down on his back without mercy, but he couldn't complain too much when he had all the sky above his head and all the world unrolling at his feet. Sometimes he thumbed a ride, and he met the most interesting people he never would have met otherwise, like the old woman driving the little chicken truck across Illinois eager to tell him the finer points of keeping chickens, or the Korean tourists on their way to Albuquerque who were so excited to test their English knowledge on a native speaker. Sometimes he hopped on a Greyhound bus at a tiny gas station way out in the middle of nowhere, with no real destination in mind, and drifted back out onto the road by himself whenever he needed to feel the pavement beneath his feet again. 

Somewhere along the way, somewhere between Chicago and Flagstaff, the sleepy summer had faded slowly and nearly imperceptibly into a crisp and chilly early fall, and from there, the fall turned into a cruel winter. It wasn't fit for man nor beast out there. The peaks towering over Flagstaff were covered in a thick blanket of snow that only seemed to get deeper with every passing day, and the streets and sidewalks were nearly empty; no one wanted to risk their neck trying to walk across such thick and slippery ice. The wind was howling, sending big wet snowflakes in a wild, dizzying spin, and the icicles hanging from the quaint old signs sometimes snapped and went flying like little arrows. He was admittedly a little bit chilly, but at least Delilah was safe in the battered old guitar case slung over his shoulder. It was only the two of them out here tonight, of course; she had been with him from one end of the earth to the other, and there wasn't anybody he'd rather have by his side, especially in the bitterest kind of winter. Wasn't much he could do about the weather, but she could warm his soul for him, and that was some kind of wonderful.

It was long past sunset and the city had closed down early. Even the other drifters and wanderers had vanished for the night, to wherever the lost went when they finally needed to disappear—to the shelters, or to their tents carefully camouflaged in the woods at the sides of highways, or into the caves hidden away in the mountains outside of town, or even to warmer places elsewhere in the world. He, however, had nowhere else he really had to be; he went wherever the wind took him, and the wind had carried him to Flagstaff and settled him down to ride out the storm. And who was he to argue?

Still, it was time for him to find some place to warm his bones and rest his weary soul. There was a place down on San Francisco Street that wasn't too bad. Tiny little hostel with little private rooms. A little too close to the train tracks for some people's tastes, but he didn't mind all that much. Everything in the world sang its own unique little song, if only you cared to listen, and the train had so much to sing about, telling the world of where it had traveled and where it was going and what it was carrying and all the people it had seen. The engine whistled, the tracks rattled, and the old metal groaned around corners and up hills, and to some, it sounded deceptively like noise, but he could hear it for what it was. A song. A story.

The cheerful Australian woman at the front desk handed him the key to his room and wished him a good night, and he trudged upstairs with Delilah in hand, the old wooden stairs creaking beneath his heavy boots. There was almost no one else in the building; it was the slow season for all the surrounding parks and monuments, and the beastly weather had stalled many an incoming traveler. Never him, though. No god nor man could stop him getting where he felt like going, come hell, high water, fire and ice, blood and darkness… 

He unlatched Delilah's case and lifted her out of her velvet-lined bed with great reverence, then sat on the edge of the little bed and started to tune her up for a nighttime duet. She was the fire, the force that consumed him and transformed him into something brighter and bigger than a mere mortal man, and he was the ice, the one who reached into the fire, unafraid, and, with a cool hand, deftly twisted all that wild, untamed force into bright and shining music. His was the blood, shed on silver strings to save lost souls, and hers was the darkness, a great sleeping potential stirred to action under his careful direction. They were separate beasts, but they were a part of each other, something greater than either could be entirely alone, and between them, they created magic.

Their duet carried long into the night, long after every light in the town had dissipated into the snowy gray silence. At last, he smiled, satisfied. He was warm and dry and safe, and Delilah was warm and dry and safe, and he couldn't possibly ask for more for either of them. He brushed a hand across the dark wood, silently thanking her for her hard work, before putting her back in the case for some well-deserved rest. And if he wasn't being too prideful, he thought perhaps he deserved a little rest, too; he took off his flowery scarves, folded them neatly, put his boots beneath the writing desk at the other side of the room, and climbed into the bed under the soft and mismatched old sheets.

And he dreamed.

In his hazy dreams, the devil waited above the window, leering nastily at his half-asleep form. His chuckle was the low hiss of frightened whispers and soured milk and sulfurous shades. The bent nails that kept the window closed bubbled and melted and puddled on the hardwood floor below, and he triumphantly wrenched it open, the wood sizzling beneath his deathly grip. That old snake crawled in easy as you please, as if he were slipping through shallow, stagnant water. Elias' pale, curious eyes followed his stuttering, halting movements through the shadows, and he made to roll out of bed, scare the devil away, send him back to hell bleeding this time, but his body felt like it was full of cold lead, boiled with frustration, and all he could do was watch, near helpless, as the devil found what he was looking for. 

_Delilah_. 

He reached a heavy hand towards the devil to tear him away from her—never mind sending him back to hell bleeding fire and brimstone, he was going to send him back to hell dead twice over. But the devil merely turned around to leer at him again, sharp-needle teeth glistening in the winter moonlight, as he snatched her up by the neck—no care or reverence for her at all—and crushed her battered old case underfoot as he dashed out through the open window again.

Elias woke up breathless, his eyes darting around the room in search of the devil.

_Just a dream_, he thought uneasily. _Just a dream_.

Until his eyes landed on the bent and crushed case that Delilah had once rested in, with Delilah herself nowhere to be seen.

His heart squeezed like an iron fist had closed around it, and he fell to his knees to examine it, but his mind failed to collect any details. All he saw were the splinters left behind, and after that, all he saw was a world dyed red with his anger.

There was a knock at the door, and he threw it open, ready to tear the devil apart with his bare hands should he dare to show his face to gloat.

But it wasn't the devil, with his shining-needle smile stretched too big across his gaunt and gleeful face, or his human skin peeling away like ash from a burning log; it was only a plain-looking woman with a too-big plaid scarf, nervously shifting from foot to foot.

“H-hey,” she said. “Is everything all right up here?”

For once in his life, he struggled to put words together. For a moment, he was a wolf and not a man, a beast of teeth and fury, crouched low scrambling on all fours and ready to swallow the unjust whole with his mighty jaws.

But this woman didn't have anything to do with that; presumably, she simply worked here and was just doing her job checking in.

He simply heaved a heavy sigh and shook his head; he couldn't very well say that it was all right when it wasn't. For some men, it would have been easy. Just a little white lie, and she would never know the difference, nor would she likely care all that much. And it was one thing to say that he didn't have it in him to lie, but the truth was another… the truth was in him, and the truth spoke through him. And the truth was that he was so angry he could barely see straight, so angry he couldn't speak.

Still, he couldn't take it out on someone who was completely uninvolved in the affair.

She timidly peeked around the doorframe to survey the damage. There were still-smoldering burn marks where the devil had ripped the window open, and the glass had warped and bubbled under the intense heat, the bottom two panes looking much more like frilly lace curtains than solid glass.

“Did—did an animal get loose in here? Did the wind break the window or something?” she asked. The look on her face told him that that wasn't the question she was asking. _What the hell happened?_ was what she wanted to ask. But she wasn't ready for the answer, so she asked questions that had safe answers, answers she already knew.

“No,” he said at last. “Not quite.”

“Oh.”

“I'll fix the window,” he said.

“Well, that's what they sent me to—”

“I'll fix it.”

And that was the end of the debate.

The woman leaned into the room, just a little bit, and carefully set the toolbox in her other hand on the hardwood floor, pushing it towards him with the tip of her boot.

“Thank you,” he said politely, inclining his head in her direction. She nodded back at him and backed out of the room slowly, though she lingered at the door, perhaps to ensure he didn't pocket any of her tools. Fine by him. He understood.

He would have to figure something out. A plan of attack. No matter how satisfying ripping the devil apart with his bare hands and bared teeth might have sounded—and it was certainly within his power—he couldn't simply charge the gates of hell in a blind rage. No, someone who dishonored Delilah like that had to suffer the full brunt of his righteous fury. Clearly the devil hadn't gotten the message yet—well, not all that surprising, the father of lies, unable to get the truth through his thick skull—but this time, Elias would make sure it stuck, and he'd make sure it stuck for good.

But for now, the window needed fixing. 

He'd given his word, after all.

He opened the toolbox and picked up the tape measure, humming to himself quietly as he went to work.

Nothing quite like working with one's hands to lift the spirit.

When the woman with the plaid scarf came back to collect her toolbox later that afternoon, she marveled at his handiwork, apparently forgetting her earlier nerves in order to trot into the room and excitedly examine the window. The glass was bright and clear again, and seemed to allow more of the silver winter sunshine into the little room than it had before; the damaged wood looked as though it had been freshly cut and sanded from a newly-fallen tree, showing no signs of the burn marks or even the normal wear and tear of its many decades of life. Even the plain, boring beige paint looked somehow more cheerful and colorful.

“Like you worked a miracle,” she noted brightly.

“Something like that,” he chuckled. “Anything is possible if you know how, and everything old can be made new again.”

“That's a nice way of thinking!”

“It's the way things tend to work when I'm around.” He glanced at Delilah's empty bed and frowned. “Say. Hate to be a bother, but I wonder if you could do me a little favor.”

“I mean, you saved me days of work. I'm not sure how, but you helped me out, so now I'm pretty sure I owe you my life. Or at least a few days of it.”

“Nothing like that. I was wondering if you could tell me where I might be able to buy a guitar around here.”

“Well, there's a music store just across the tracks and a couple blocks over, up on 66. Never been in there, so I'm sorry I can't tell you if their selection is any good or not, but it's a pretty big place, so there's probably something.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Or I guess you could find somebody in Wheeler Park and trade him for a song and a sandwich. Strange things happen at the farmers' market sometimes.”

“Thank you. You've been very helpful.” He smiled and held up her toolbox. “I believe this is yours.”

“Oh, yes, thank you.” She accepted it with a grateful smile, and later, while searching for a pipe wrench to fix the dripping kitchen sink downstairs, she would find that every tool inside looked newer and brighter in a way she could never quite explain, that all the rust and grime was suddenly gone and every edge had been ground sharp as the reaper's scythe; she would try to blame her poor eyesight and her smudged glasses and the constant dim lighting in the hostel… but she knew. Deep in her heart, she knew the truth.

_Everything old can be made new again_.

Elias piled on his scarves. It was still just a little chilly outside, considering the four feet of snow on the ground, and more still falling with every passing moment, but the worn old lace and the soft floral fabric draped around his shoulders like a mighty king's mantle were all he needed; the cold hardly dared touch him, and the ice melted away beneath his boots. Such was the warmth of the truth. Not like the cloven hoofprints of hellfire that the devil left in his wake, twisting and deforming everything he touched… no, this was the peaceful warmth of growth, like spring sunshine waking the sleeping world anew.

Going across the train tracks took him up onto good old Route 66 and past several native art galleries and a bike shop, all nearly empty because of the snowstorm surrounding the town. There was one older native man sitting at an easel in his gallery and painting something, and Elias caught his eye and gave him a quick passing smile. One artist to another. The older man smiled back, just a little, and selected a new color for his paint before he was out of sight once more.

The music store was similarly empty. Elias glanced around to see if anybody was there lurking behind the rows of speakers and amplifiers with big, bright yellow price tags on them. He rang the little hotel bell on the front counter, but no one answered it, not even so much as a shout of 'I'll be right there!' or 'one moment, please!'; for all he knew, the last one out before the storm might have simply forgotten to lock the building up before they left, hoping to outrun the snow before it piled up too high. Either way, he didn't want to linger on the doorstep too long. Not when he had business to attend to. He walked further inside to survey the wall full of guitars, pale eyes carefully scanning each one. That bright blue electric up in the corner was far too wild, too willful; he could tell, just by looking at it, that it would refuse to be tamed. A guitar like that wouldn't cooperate with man nor god. No. The black acoustic beneath it was pretty enough, but looked somehow brittle; no matter how hard he tried, he wouldn't be able to coax the same kind of music out of it as he did Delilah, because there simply wasn't much music in her. Maybe okay for a ten-year-old kid just starting out, but not quite enough for his purposes.

At last his breath caught in his throat as his eyes landed on a valiant veteran lying in a forgotten corner carelessly collecting dust, an old Fender Wildwood with soft swirls of ghostly green sneaking through the pale wood. Its surface was scuffed and nicked, and it was missing a string, but it was strong and sturdy despite its lack of care. The old soldier still wanted to sing; he had a lot of stories to tell, and there were still a few songs left in his old bones, just waiting to be played by the right hands. Elias reverently picked up the old Wildwood as he searched for a price tag, then looked around for someone to help him again. The place was still deserted, but he was in a hurry. He took the old soldier up to the front counter and propped it up against the wall as he rummaged through the pockets of his dusty black jeans. He came up with a fair amount of cash, then borrowed a sticky note and a pen from the counter. 'For the Wildwood, thank you – E. Samson,' he noted, sticking it to the mound of wadded-up bills next to the phone.

Once he returned to the hostel, he set about restoring the old soldier to its former glory. He removed the old, loose, worn-out strings and put them to the side, then reached for a rag and polish to buff out the scuffs and scratches that marred the surface. It took a careful hand and a lot of elbow grease, but it was only a matter of time until he could see his own face staring back at him from the shining pale wood, and he smiled approvingly. Next came some new bright silver strings, real silver, and a long-overdue tuning. As he tuned it, he wondered who had owned it before; it must have had so many stories to tell, but whose story was it? Maybe an old woman who played hymns out on the porch of her cabin on Sunday mornings just after church. Maybe a man not unlike himself, walking into the sunset, who made the distant horizon his only home. Maybe a woman draped in lace and feathers, singing songs of smoke and darkness, reflecting on the rich mysteries of her life. So many stories to tell. But an old soldier was good at keeping his secrets.

He strummed the strings, then tweaked them just a little further, and hummed in satisfaction as he strummed them again.

“Good work,” he praised.

_Everything old can be made new again_.

Elias set the Wildwood against the little writing desk—no matter how good of company and valiant a fighter he might have been, it didn't feel right to put him to rest in Delilah's case, not just yet—and climbed in to bed. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, he struck out on the road again. He would find her, wherever the devil had hidden her, no matter how treacherous it might have been, and he would bring her back home where she belonged with his own two hands.

But for now, he slept, in something like peace, under the watchful eye of the old soldier.

The next morning, he woke up, collected his things, and made his way downstairs. The woman with the plaid scarf was sitting on the floor repairing a coffee table with a broken leg, taking a moment to marvel at each strangely-new tool as she picked them up from the toolbox, and she was chatting to the Australian woman leaning on the front desk. The Australian woman tilted her big, floppy hat up so that she could see him beneath the brim and smiled.

“Checking out?”

“Afraid so, ladies,” he chuckled.

“Don't go!” the woman on the floor laughed. “It's been so quiet and so boring around here! I wanna hear ya play some more!”

“I have places I have to go,” he said. “So many eyes to open, so many souls to save… my work is never done. But I'll make my way back down here sometime.” He considered the fluffy plaid scarf around her neck, then glanced back at the Australian woman's floppy black hat. “Might I ask one more thing of you before I drift away?”

“Sure,” the Australian woman said.

“Might I borrow your hat, and your scarf?” He smiled.

“You'll need something to keep you warm,” the woman on the floor said, immediately unwrapping the massive scarf from around her neck and tossing it to him. “I don't know how you're walking around in anything less than five layers of clothes in this snow, but here you are, no coat, not even sleeves, just lace scarves. Maybe you wouldn't have to wear so many scarves if you just had sleeves on your shirts.”

“Not enough sense to come in from the cold,” the other woman joked, clicking her tongue, but she willingly gave him her hat. “Tilt the brim down a little further, it'll make you look more mysterious. Yeah, like that.”

“You can barely see his face!”

“That's the idea.” A hat to hide his face, the massive, fluffy plaid scarf bunched up to hide the distinctive set of his shoulders and the shape of his arms, and a new name to hide behind. The devil would never know what hit him. “I'll be back again to return these to you, ladies. You have my word.”

“Where are you going, anyway?” the Australian woman asked.

He smiled. “To beat the devil.”

“Well, good luck,” the woman on the floor chuckled. “I'll pray for you!”

“I would appreciate it. Thank you.”

He tipped his borrowed hat to them, and they laughed appreciatively, saying their goodbyes as he disappeared out the door and out onto Old 66.

His first stop was Wheeler Park downtown; it was as empty and lonely, and probably as cold, as the surface of the moon. No matter. He knelt on a dry patch of mossy ground beneath a ponderosa pine and opened his guitar case, feeling Delilah's absence ache like a phantom limb, frowning for a moment before he lifted the old soldier out and tossed thirty-seven cents from his pocket in; no one emptied their pockets into an empty case. Satisfied, at least for the moment, he settled beneath the pine with the old Wildwood in his lap and strummed it. Not the prettiest sound in the world, but the old soldier was a tenacious old bastard, and the sound of it made him smile a little. And between the two of them, they spun together music at the spur of the moment like the golden thread of fate woven out of the ether, deftly measured out time like the reaper at the other end of the thread. 

At first, only the crows came to hear him, squawking along hoarsely as they pecked at the ground in search of their dinner. They lingered around him, coming closer and closer to hear his songs; one even bravely decided to flutter up to sit on the headstock of the Wildwood as he played. He smiled at the bird, who looked sideways at him and fluffed his wings out before settling down all comfortable. A tiny little clatter caught his attention as the bird's well-meaning brother dropped a loose coat button into the guitar case next to the thirty-seven cents, and he chuckled. Well, charity was charity, he supposed.

“I was there at the attempted murder, the murder in the snow… oh, you shoulda seen the sight, it was something to behold…” he sang. “I said I'd keep their secret, leave it out there in the cold, but there wasn't no blood nor body, just seven crows all told…”

The charitable crow cawed in appreciation, and Elias smiled down at it.

His first human audience of the day was an old man shuffling out of the library at the other side of the park. The old man was hunched and bent over his cane, his face buried into the high collar of his moth-eaten coat and the scarf wrapped up many times around his thin old neck. He grumbled to himself as he started to shuffle through the deep snow. As he drew closer, Elias noted there was a little spring returned to his step, perhaps the kind of spring that had carried him down many a long and winding road in his life; he looked like he had once been a drifting man, too, with leathery skin no doubt toughened by the harsh desert sun, and a lot of stories drifting in his clouded old eyes. But those eyes brightened just a little when they landed on the Wildwood in Elias' lap. He leaned on his cane again, suddenly relaxed, transported to the good old days once more, back when his bones didn't ache with arthritis, and his vision was clear enough to see all eternity from on top of Mount Elden, and he could have had the world for a song without getting out of breath once, and the world was an untamed thing yet, all wild with possibility.

Elias began to pluck out a good old Hoyt Axton tune. “I've been to wild Montana, I went there in a storm, my boots were Texas leather, my Levis wet and torn… loved it in Montana, loved it in the storm, I think I'm gonna cross that river, I just might be reborn…”

There was a glimmer of recognition and remembrance in the old-timer's clouded eyes as he mouthed the words to the song silently. _Don't you ever give up the fight, sure be glad when you see the dawn, somebody, somebody turns on the light, somebody turns on the light_…

When the last note faded into the cold, quiet winter air, the old-timer reached into his pocket and tossed a ragged five-dollar bill into the broken and splintered old case. The crow still sitting on the headstock of the guitar cawed as if to thank him, and the old man shuffled away again, merrily humming the song to himself as he disappeared over the hill on Humphreys Street.

Elias sang to the crows again for a little while, but once the sun came out for the afternoon, more people started shuffling around downtown. Some simply shook their heads at the clearly mad man sitting in the snow surrounded by crows. Some stopped on the sidewalk to listen to the distant music for a moment, before continuing on their way with a little more of a spring in their step. And a brave few carefully approached him, somehow reverent, unthinkingly bowing their heads as they listened to him sing and play. Everyone who came to him gave of whatever they had, and soon, Delilah's case was filled up with coins and bills.

At the end of the day, he packed up his case and slung it on his back, and walked eastward up Old 66, the setting sun at his back as the mighty snow-capped mountains morphed into rolling desert hills once more. Cars honked at him, and a couple slowed down to check if he needed help or could use a lift somewhere, but he politely declined each one. He passed through Winona and Winslow like a shadow, as if he had never even touched the earth with his feet. 

He stopped to rest in a massive truck stop plaza, somewhere between Holbrook and the Petrified Forest, the only oasis around for miles; there he picked up a cup of strong coffee and took up temporary residence inside the little truckers' chapel tucked away almost unnoticed between the gas station and the showers. God hadn't lived here in some time, by the look of it. His were the first footsteps in months, perhaps even years, to disturb the layer of red desert sand that had made its way inside over the ages, blown in through the main doors and shuffled about by indifferent sweeping and travelers rushing elsewhere. The air was thick with the dry yellow smell of old bibles slowly crumbling to dust, and when he flipped the switch for it, the neon cross above the altar flickered and buzzed weakly a few times before burning out with a sad and stark finality.

Still, he set down his case on one of the mismatched chairs near the door and opened it up, once again laying down a princely sum of fifty-six cents on the shredded red velvet inside.

He strummed and hummed thoughtfully for a moment before settling on an old Johnny Cash favorite._Well, I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt, and the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert_… 

Mostly people stopped to stare for just a moment before moving on, but that was all right. They would carry word of him to the ends of the earth, and that was all he hoped for. All part of a greater plan.

_On a Sunday morning sidewalk, I'm wishing Lord that I was stoned, 'cause there's something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone_…

A quarter with a hole through the center, as if pierced by a bullet, landed in the broken case, and he stopped playing to look sideways at the donor from beneath his floppy borrowed hat. He was tall but bent crooked, and he has a tattered, ugly brown coat draped across his strange bony frame, and Elias knew at once who he was.

“You sound awful lonesome, son,” the devil said, his false sympathy like sugar-coated cyanide.

“I suppose I am,” Elias said. “Been a long, cold, lonely road.”

“But you still sing.”

“Always.” He strummed the old soldier's silver strings idly.

“I wonder if you would let an old-timer help you out of the hole you've dug for yourself,” the devil said. Elias yearned to slap the oily smile off his face, but he had to remind himself—all in due time, all in due time. “What's your name, son?”

“Logan. Logan Shulo.”

“Logan. What would you say if I told you I could make all your dreams come true? No longer would you have to toil in truck stops and sing on street corners…”

“I'd have to say that would be mighty big of you.”

“I can give you the world, son.” The devil tried his hand at looking thoughtful and failed. Truth—even something as simple as the seeming of it—was not an easy thing for the king of all liars to understand, after all. Instead, he turned his back to the burnt-out neon cross on the chapel wall, the shadow of a great serpent falling across it in the dim half-light, and looked up at the cobwebbed ceiling. “You will wander for some time yet, Logan, that's true. But your days of aimless drifting are over. For I see potential in you, and I will set you in a high place at the end of your wandering days.”

“Mm.”

“However, there is something you must do for me… nothing comes for free, you see.”

“Of course not.” The corners of Elias' mouth twitched just slightly. “What do you want me to do?”

The devil turned his head to smile at the so-called Logan, and it was like a cluster of broken glass spilling from his mouth. “Suffer.” He chuckled. “To prove yourself to me, you will undergo a trial in the wilderness… you will become the living dead, a man without a name. Your feet will bleed from your walking, and hunger will gnaw at your stomach. You will be cloaked in the filth of the earth, never to sleep under a kind roof or a soft bed. The faint of heart may run frightened from you. But if, at the end of a year, you have never once despaired of your lowly state, if, through your suffering, you have proven yourself worthy of my favor, you will be granted every extravagance your heart desires. No longer a grimy drifter living in the shadows and playing for pennies, but a king in the highest glittering castle, with the beating heart of the world in the palm of your hand. Never again will you want for luxury in this life… money, power, fame, company, anything you want will be yours for the taking. However… nothing lasts forever. At the end of your life, you will be mine. The world, in exchange for your soul.” He chuckled, all too satisfied with himself. “Do we have a deal, Logan?”

Elias smiled and inclined his head, and the devil seemed pleased by this.

“Very well. In a year, I will find you, and I will see if you are deserving.”

There was a flash of blue flame and the stench of burning sulfur, and then the devil was gone as if he'd never been there at all, leaving Elias and the old soldier alone in the shadow of the burnt-out neon cross.

There was no one easier to fool than a constant, consummate liar; he wouldn't see the truth if it whipped off the hat and scarf and smashed the silver-stringed guitar right across that broken-glass smile.

And that was exactly how Elias wanted it.

He carelessly tossed the quarter with the hole through it over his shoulder and into the cobwebbed corner of the chapel, where it would collect dust until the sea swallowed the sun for all he knew or cared; he did not care to carry the emptiness of the devil's sins around with him as he walked his righteous path.

There were many people who wondered why he walked, and there were as many answers as people who had asked. 

Perhaps it was that he walked to clear his mind, as a form of moving meditation; the darkness of the world weighed heavy on a man's shoulders, and he had to keep walking to outpace the shadow as his heels. There was a light just over the horizon, beyond all the darkness, and he couldn't very well find his peace by staying in one place; no, he would never give up the chase.

Perhaps it was that walking allowed him to slow down and see the world in a way that most men didn't, at least not anymore; everyone was constantly in a rush to get between point A and point B, constantly swept up in the overwhelming pace of their busy lives, and it was hard to truly live according to a schedule. No, Elias preferred a good story to a schedule. He met so many interesting people with fascinating lives on the road, and he wouldn't have traded their stories for all the riches in the world. Wealth was ephemeral, easily passed… but stories were a form of immortality, and he carried so many stories with him as he walked.

And perhaps, he reflected, it had something to do with the way the stars looked over the desert as he walked along the empty road at midnight, out where there were no lights to cloud the sky. Perhaps it had something to do with the soft wind rustling the red-orange sand across the hard stone like a whispered secret. Perhaps it had something to do with the way the road stretched on forever, swallowed up by the night like eternity swallowing up the universe. And perhaps it had something to do with the soft thump of his worn leather boots across the cracked, sun-bleached pavement like a sure and steady heartbeat.

He slid the old soldier around on the strap, took the pick from its place in the strings, and started strumming as he walked the lonely old highway, singing from his heart to the gracious and welcoming night.

_Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood, let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood, let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves, let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace… Let me die in my footsteps, before I go down under the ground_…

And all the world seemed to sing along with him, the coyotes and the wind and the sand and the shooting stars above.

Come sunrise, he backed down the eastbound highway with his thumb out and the old soldier once again securely strapped to his back. A couple of semi trucks carelessly rolled past, their air horns roaring with cruel mirth, but he didn't mind all that much. Better to be alone than to be stuck in bad company.

Sometime around mid-morning, a battered and beaten green pickup truck slowed down and stopped some distance up the road, flashing its lights to signal him. He ran to catch up and peered through the window to appraise the driver and the condition of the truck's cab. The bed was full of furniture and other junk tied down with ratchet straps, and the cab was watched over by a whole mess of wiggling solar-powered figurines, mostly little sunflowers with tiny sunglasses, though he spied a little pink flamingo with flapping wings hidden in the little sunflower forest. The man probably wasn't much older than Elias, with shaggy rust-red hair and a fox-like face shaded by a tattered navy-blue baseball cap, and his grin was lopsided, but kind. Elias decided he liked the look of him and climbed into the passenger seat.

“Where ya headed?” he asked.

“Amarillo,” he said. Why Amarillo? Seemed like a nice place, that was all. Go see the sights, learn a few new songs. Maybe go watch a rodeo—and why the hell not? It was amazing what you could do when you were in no rush to get anywhere in particular.

“Well, that's a bit far outta my way, but I can get you as far as Gallup,” the red-haired man said, scratching the day's worth of scruff on his chin.

“Thank you, that would be great,” Elias said politely. “Where are you headed?”

“Would you believe me if I said Roswell?” Elias couldn't help but laugh. “It's dumb, I guess, but I'm meeting this girl out there, girl I've known awhile, and we're gonna go to see all the alien stuff. Eat at the UFO Mcdonald's. Real romantic, let me tell you. When she told me she was 'adventurous,' it wasn't quite what I was expectin', but tell the truth, I kinda like it.” 

“It sounds like a good time,” Elias said.

“Last time we went to go see all the Mothman stuff in West Virginia… she had a family reunion in Ohio, but she texted me as a joke, like, 'come save me, please,' and I had the weekend off, nothing to do but sit on the couch starin' at the ceiling, so I hauled ass out to the airport, got a rental car in Columbus, and rescued her. Like, surprise, here I am, I called your bluff. Let's go look for the Mothman. Dumb thing to do, I guess, but we had fun.” The red-haired man grinned as he nervously drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Did you ever find Mothman?”

“If I told you, I would have to kill you.”

“Fair enough,” he chuckled. “You have to keep some things a mystery.”

“I know, right? Imagine how boring life would be if you had everything figured out. Sometimes I just find myself doing dumb stuff, like, 'I guess this is what's happening now,' sometimes I don't even remember how I got there, but I have a good time.”

Elias smiled and hummed as he looked out of the window at the painted desert racing by outside. “We're going nowhere slowly, but we're seeing all the sights, and we're definitely going to hell, but we'll have all the best stories to tell…”

“Yeah, what you said,” the red-haired man said.

“What's next after Roswell? Bigfoot-hunting?”

“Maybe I'll get my passport and we'll go to Scotland to look for the Loch Ness Monster.”

“That's a big trip. Maybe save that for the honeymoon or something big like that.”

“I mean—” The man's face turned almost as red as his hair.

“I can picture it now,” Elias said, amused. “You'll save up and fly out there, and on the banks of Loch Ness, you'll give her a ring. Not a fancy one. Just a little plastic one from a vending machine, because she might like that.”

“She would.”

“And while she's stunned to silence, and while you're still down on one knee, it will happen—the monster will rise from the depths and the fog, chittering and hissing, and you will drop the ring and reach for your phones, both of you, but you will only get the blurry image of the tail of a great sea-snake plunging back into the depths. But you will remember it for the rest of your days. And it will be only the first of many great adventures.”

“Man, I hope so.”

“Trust me. I never lie, and I'm never wrong.” He smiled.

They talked of many things as they zipped along I-40—the Mogollon Monster, the Jersey Devil, the Phoenix Lights, but mostly, they spoke about the girl and her adventurous streak. The red-haired man was certain that she didn't believe in a single thing she went chasing after; he thought that she was just trying to trick him into going outside and hiking, but he was kind of a sucker for playing along with it, wasn't he? Not that he minded. And the more he thought about it, maybe he even liked it a little. Maybe even a lot. Walking, you know. It was… freeing, somehow.

And Elias nodded thoughtfully. Though the other man was rambling, and a little flustered, he seemed to understand.

When they reached the gas station in Gallup, the red-haired man insisted that he take a hastily-scrawled sticky note with his phone number and name—Elliott Jacoby, of Las Vegas, Nevada—on it. “You know, just in case you drift back this way sometime, and you need a ride somewhere. It was real nice talkin' to you. I think I learned a few things.”

“I'm sure you did.” Elias smiled as he folded up the sticky note and put it in his pocket for later. “And I'm sure I'll see you again somewhere down the road. Thank you.”

Elliott honked his horn and waved as he departed, disappearing around the corner of the gas station and away beyond the horizon.

Elias went inside and requested a ticket for the next bus eastward. The old woman at the counter took his payment, printed the ticket out, and cheerfully asked if he wanted a coffee or a 'fresh' doughnut from the cabinet to keep him going, but he politely declined. With his passage to Amarillo paid, he went back outside to sit on the curb, waiting for the Greyhound to come running for him. Such places were liminal by their very nature, half-in and half-out of the regular world, places where no one really went to, just passed through, but there was something about the desert that made them appear downright otherworldly. You could never be sure whether you were really there at all, even as you ate the pack of peanuts you'd picked off the shelf and paid for; all that was certain was that your wallet was a couple dollars lighter than it had been at the start of the day, and for all you knew, the station had vanished in the heat haze as soon as your back was turned.

Eventually the bus arrived and he climbed on, securing the long seat at the very back for himself. He pulled his borrowed too-big scarf over himself like a blanket and drifted to sleep, and when he dreamed, he dreamed of Delilah under the big desert sky. Shooting stars and silver strings. Like it was meant to be, like it was always meant to be. Like it would soon be again.

When he arrived in Amarillo, the first purple streaks of dawn were just beginning to stain the sky, and the city was waking up, slowly but surely. The creatures of the night slunk away into the shadows of alleys to elude the sun, and the children of the day were beginning to stumble out of their homes, picking up newspapers and watering flowers and making their breakfasts. Cars and city buses chugged sleepily along the street, carrying people to work in dingy little diners and high-rise office buildings, and his people, the drifters and the vagabonds, were taking their places on the street corners like weary sentries. But he didn't want to edge anybody off of their established corner—rude, you know—so he picked up the old soldier and walked a few blocks south and west until he found an expansive park with enough room for everyone to roam freely.

He found a nice tree and sat down to idly pluck a few notes on the guitar, warming up before he started the day. Already the insects were beginning to sing and buzz as the first narrow rays of the sun began to peek over the skyline, and he hummed appreciatively. Nature's music. Jazz. The world was so lively, and so few people anymore stopped to look and listen. Not that the blamed them. Change was part of life, after all, and people were merely adapting to the changes that modern life demanded of them. Still, folks could use a little bit of time set aside to daydream. Listen to some buzzing insects, look at the shapes of clouds in the sky. Take a nice little walk.

He had zoned out staring at the wispy pink clouds floating across the early-morning sky, playing a little bit of the Allman Brothers to amuse himself—_you're my blue sky, you're my sunny day_, he hummed to himself—when a croaky old voice reached his ears.

“Big, strong fella,” it said.

He looked up at an old woman shuffling closer, deviating from the well-traveled footpath nearby. There was a heavy leather purse hung over one arm and a cane gripped tightly in her other hand, and though her glasses were thick, her eyes were bright and shining like chips of ice.

“Big, strong fella,” she repeated. “I think I got a job for you.”

“Oh?” he chuckled, amused.

“Come along with me,” she said, as if that settled the matter entirely. She began shuffling off towards the path again, and he shouldered the old soldier in his case and walked after her, careful to keep his strides short so that she didn't fall behind. “I could use a big, strong fella like you to do some important work. I coulda done it myself, back in my day—I built cars in my day! my arms were almost as big as yours, believe me, boy—but they just ain't as strong now.” She tried to flex the arm with the purse hanging over it, but didn't raise it very high up.

“I'll do the best I can,” he said agreeably. Why not? Perhaps she needed someone to fetch her cat out of a tree, or carry her groceries home. Either way, it wasn't like he had pressing business of his own, and there were worse ways to spend an afternoon. 

“Ahh, you'll do fine,” she said, dismissing his modesty with a wave of her hand, and he chuckled again.

The further they walked into the cluster of trees, the more he saw that the path was overgrown with sickly yellow grass and carelessly littered with used cigarettes and crumpled beer cans. It had been some time since this place had seen the sun, and so it had withered in the darkness. But that didn't seem to scare the old woman in the least. She shuffled on, determined, carefully ambling down the steps of natural, uneven stone half-hidden by the sand and the grass, and he followed, taking in the scenery with interest. Rows and rows of weathered wooden benches descended down the slope of the hill in a half-circle, leading down to a ramshackle little theatre with faded and tattered rags dangling from the curtain rods hidden behind the arch. Boards were broken or missing from the stage entirely, and the footlights at the end of it were rusted bright red and missing their bulbs. The old woman was right; the place could have used a little work.

“A theatre?” he asked her as she set her purse down on the front bench nearby and started digging around in it.

“Oh, the best theatre in the world. You shoulda seen this place back in my day,” she said, shaking her head. “Events every week, every one of these benches would be full, there would be people standing on the steps. Shakespeare in the park, free jazz concerts on summer Saturdays. Neighborhood talent night. It was like a big party, everyone loved it.” He nodded. “Everybody used to come here, like we were a community, because we were, and people would make a whole day of it. Bring a picnic, come see the Dixieland Delights.”

“Sounds like a good time.”

“It was!” She nodded as enthusiastically as she could. “But it's falling all to pieces now, because no one bothers to slow down and enjoy their day, do they? It's all hustle and bustle now, nonstop.” He nodded again. “And see, you're a big, strong fella, but as soon as I seen you sittin' under that tree, just enjoying your day, I thought to myself, there's a man who knows a little something good about life. Plus, you look like you can swing a hammer.”

“That I can.”

“Here, then.” She produced a claw hammer and a large box of nails from the bottom of her purse. He couldn't help but laugh as he took them. “I want to rebuild this place. Maybe I'm just too old and stuck living in the glory days, maybe it'll never be as good as I remember it being again, maybe it's too late for it, maybe the world has moved on… but we can always try and do our best, can't we?”

“Of course.”

“Good man.” She patted his arm before sitting down on one of the benches in the front row. “You'll find a cache of fresh lumber down there in that clearing, under a tarp and some leaves… I had some young men from the Home Depot deliver it, but they were in too much of a hurry to stay behind and help me out.”

“It's a pity.”

“Isn't it?” she tsked and shook her head. “So let's get started.”

“On one condition,” he said with a smile.

“I suppose that's fair. I'll warn you now, though, I don't have a lot of money…”

“Oh, no, nothing like that, ma'am. I just wondered if you could talk while I work. Tell me a few stories about the glory days. It'll get me in a good working mood, give me a clearer vision.”

“Good man,” she said with a cheerful cackle. “Well, let me start with the kids who used to come here, that's who we're doing this for. Now, back in, I think, 87, they decided they were gonna do Dracula as a Halloween play, but they decided to modernize it just a little, they were gonna set it in the streets of New York.”

“Leave their own little touch on it?”

“Yes, it was a good idea. So these high school kids decide to make a subway set and draw graffiti on black paper with chalk, and it looks good, and anyway, it kept them from vandalizing real buildings. But then, I guess, their teacher didn't get the memo, and arranged the stage like a Victorian living room anyway. So there's this subway graffiti on the wall, but there's flower vases and a couch on the stage.”

“And was Dracula dressed up in 1980s clothes, or—?”

“Top hat and cape, straight from the Halloween aisle at the drugstore,” she cackled. “The set was confusing, but those kids gave it their all, they had a good time. Never seen a better Dracula in all my life!”

“Not even Bela Lugosi?”

“Bela Lugosi wishes he was as good as that young man!”

Elias laughed heartily as he set about prying up the rotting, mildewed gray-green boards of the stage with a crowbar left near the cache of fresh lumber.

She told him story after story—the kid who tapdanced to Ray Charles like a fiend and won pretty much every talent show he entered, the Midsummer Night's Dream that took place in the middle of the heaviest thunderstorm of the year but still went on even after everybody was completely drenched, jazz concerts, Fourth of July hotdog-eating contests and fireworks displays, Christmas caroling festivals… it was such a beloved place, it definitely seemed a shame that it should have faded away and crumbled like it did, crushed beneath the wheels of time.

She even told him her own story. Back in '71, or maybe it was '73, at any rate, it was definitely an odd number, she had done the talent contest, too… she wasn't sure she had anything you could call talent, she said, but a friend had convinced her to play the guitar with her meager skill and sing Joe Hill with her rusty, croaky voice, and her friend wildly applauded and whistled, even though no one else really did… she was beginning to drift off to sleep after so animatedly telling her stories, stories that she had held inside for a long time, stored up like treasure and untouched for years. Eventually, he heard her snoring quietly from her place on the bench. But that was all right.

When she woke up again near sunset, everything old was made new again. The curtain was patched almost seamlessly, like it had been cut from fresh cloth instead of tattered rags dangling from a rod for God only knows how many years; the wood of the stage was bright and clean as springtime, and the lights were shining like the first stars to ever hang in the sky. He brushed the sawdust from his borrowed plaid scarf and smiled at her, though he was uncertain if she could see him through the veil of tears welling up in her eyes, as if she were seeing Heaven's shining glory laid out before her. Everything that had been so old and decrepit and hopeless, made new and bright once more…

“Well, it's a little bit of a rush job, but it's just about done. I'm not much of a tailor, I'm afraid, so I did what I could with the curtains, even though it's likely not the best…”

She made a little noise in the back of her throat and wiped away her tears with her leathery old hand. Even after she had spent the entire day chattering so cheerfully, she was utterly speechless.

“You like it?” he chuckled.

She nodded.

“I'm glad.” He smiled. “Thank you for the opportunity.”

He finished brushing the sawdust from the scarf and reached for the Wildwood in its case, leaning against the steps of the stage. It was a good day; he liked a good opportunity to work with his hands. Music was his preferred work, but it was nice to build something concrete like a new window or a stage, too; it was immensely satisfying to look over and see something that hadn't even existed at the start of the day, something that wouldn't be lost on the wind the way a song might be sometimes. He hummed to himself cheerfully, guitar case over his shoulder as he started to walk up the stairs in the side of the hill again, but at last, the old woman seemed to find her voice, though it was reduced to a strangled little squawk.

“One more thing,” she said.

He looked over his shoulder.

“Can you play for me? Up on the stage?” She smiled almost shyly. “I'm sorry it's not to a big audience, it's just a crazy old woman lost in the past, but…”

“I'd be honored.”

He walked back down to the stage and climbed the new stairs, and under the light of the full moon, he played. 

_I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me… says I, 'but Joe, you're ten years dead,' 'I never died,' said he, 'no, I never died,' said he…_

The world held its breath as he sang; the years fell away beneath his mighty voice, and for just that moment, time was put on hold, and the old woman was young again, the young woman in beads and feathers who had come down here for the Fourth of July and Christmas carols and the talent show, who had played the guitar for one memorably mediocre performance of Joe Hill in '71, or maybe it was '73, with the warm summer sunshine on her face and the friendly wind tousling her long, dark hair…

And when the encore was over sometime around midnight, she was in the present time again, and her bones were old and aching, and her steps were slow and careful, and her eyes were going, and her voice was merely an old frog-croak now… but it didn't seem like that long ago that she had been young and things had been good.

Elias accepted a grateful hug from her and helped her back up the steps built into the hillside; he offered to walk her home, but she brushed him off and walked away under the orange glow of the streetlights, humming to herself as she went, and he smiled before he started walking the other way, singing the rising sun over the horizon.

_I see the sunrise creeping in, everything changes like the desert wind, here she comes and then she's gone again… I'm just a traveler on this earth, sure as my heart's behind the pocket of my shirt, I'll just keep rolling till I'm in the dirt, 'cause I'm a traveler, oh, I'm a traveler_…  
He wandered, he meandered, he drifted, for that was what God put him on this earth to do. It wasn't exactly a glamorous existence, but he enjoyed it—walking the earth, singing his song, making magic and changing lives.

In the following weeks and months, he walked across northern Texas and some of Oklahoma; he hitched a ride to Salina, Kansas, with a boisterous, friendly truck driver who desperately wanted to give him some religious literature, and who liked shouting into his old-fashioned CB radio, scolding the other truckers for swearing on the air or using the Lord's name in vain. Not on his watch! No, sir! And would you like to hear about his kids? The littlest one was Sadie and the older one was Aiden. He couldn't show the other truckers pictures of them over the CB radio, of course, but he could show Elias his wallet right there in the cab, as long as Elias promised not to steal his library card and the two dollars he had set aside to buy a pack of sunflower seeds to snack on later.

The trucker dropped him off in Salina with a tiny bible in his back pocket, and he wandered around town for a little while, playing on a couple of street corners for a few pennies until the police politely requested that he move along.

After the third time it happened, he could see that there was nothing much waiting for him in Salina, it was just a place he was meant to pass through, so he climbed a fence and into a railyard full of stopped trains. He picked one that he liked the look of and climbed into the little space between the connector and the ladder at the back—no one would tell you this, but there was exactly enough space for someone to curl up there for a night. He cushioned his little rusted bed with the plaid scarf and Delilah's old case was his pillow; not exactly luxurious, but it was worth it to watch the prairie unrolling in front of him and the clouds drifting through the sky above him. Isolated farmhouses became little farm communities became little towns became small cities and then faded back into the prairie grass like dreams upon waking, as if they were never there at all.

And when he dreamed that night, he dreamed of an infernal shadow passing over him; it reached for him with the vile claws of despair, but it could not touch him. The edges of the shadow were burned away like the first slim rays of dawn burning away the night, leaving a stench of sulfur hanging in the air before it was blown away by the breeze, and, oh, even in his dreams, Elias could feel the fear radiating from its dark heart, until finally, it fled away from him, leaving him to sleep in peace.

There was nothing more the devil feared than the truth, and the devil would lie to himself for all the ages of the world before he looked the truth in its eyes even once.

On his way across Missouri, Elias propped his feet up on the edge of his little compartment and strummed the old soldier's silver strings, singing to himself softly above the roar of the train and the tracks below. _Look to the heavens, you can look to the sky, you can find redemption staring back into your eyes, there's protection and there's peace just the same, burnin' your ticket for that long black train… but you know there's victory in the Lord, I say, victory in the Lord… cling to the father and his holy name, and don't go ridin' on that long black train_…

The old soldier had seen many a man climb onto the devil's long black train in his day; the song came out of him somewhat weary, like it was a story embedded deep in the wood itself, a ghost of owners past. The old soldier had so much fight still left in him, wound tight in his strings, and Elias looked to the sky as the final note of the song dissipated into the cold midwinter air. Soon. His day would come, the final battle of his long and storied life, the final song just waiting to escape from the wood and silver. Elias had found such a good companion in the old soldier, and the old soldier had found his final companion, and though any fool would have seen an inanimate box of strings, he saw it for what it truly was—a creature of earth and air, with a voice all his own and a story to tell.

And it was an honor to walk with such a proud and tough old thing, to be a part of his story.

In St Louis he hopped off of the train and went south, because that seemed just as good a direction as any other, and several days later, somewhere in the northeast corner of Arkansas, he took a turn to the east, with only the vague and cheerful notion that he would have liked to see the first sunrise of the spring coming up over the mountains of Tennessee. He spent the last days of the harsh, bitter winter in the woods of the Smoky Mountains, sheltered in a thicket of dormant vines beneath spruces and ashes so tall they might have been endless and blanketed with only his borrowed scarf and a soft layer of dry, dead leaves all matted together. Still, he couldn't complain when his luxurious dinner consisted of fresh wild rabbit, chanterelle mushrooms washed in a mountain stream, blackberries straight from a bush, and a delightful drink made of fresh sassafras root and cold spring water, a little bit like a root beer that wasn't fizzy.

He idly played the forest a song to thank it for its bounty as he drowsed in his little earth-bed, happy for what he'd been blessed with, however little it might have seemed.

Some time later, he abruptly woke up to the twang of strings in the distance—older and wearier yet somehow cheerier than the old soldier, echoing from the fog that had fallen upon the mountains. Elias' pale eyes darted around as he searched for the source of the sound, and out of the woods came a ghost, strolling through the undergrowth without stirring a single leaf. He was long and tall, somewhere in his middle age, and his face was kind and cheerful, though you never could have picked it out of a crowd if you tried; he carried an old battered guitar, and he was strumming idly as he walked, humming like he was just at the beginning of a new song, and he stopped when he saw Elias.

“Well, hello there,” he said pleasantly, and Elias detected a little southern twang at the edge of his voice.

“Good evening,” Elias replied, inclining his head respectfully.

“Isn't it?” The ghost smiled. “Mind if I sit for a spell?”

“Certainly.”

The ghost sat down and leaned against a tree, plucking out a few notes on the guitar thoughtfully, and the strings glittered like fresh silver under the moonlight. “Not often I see a kindred spirit all the way out here, especially nowadays. What brings you all this way?”

“Got a score to settle,” Elias answered.

“Oh?”

“I'm going to beat the devil.” He smiled as the ghost laughed appreciatively. “He stole something precious to me, and he'd like to steal a lot more than that, I'm sure. But I tell you, I'm going to take back everything and maybe a little more than that. Gonna get back my Delilah, gonna keep my soul… and maybe I'll steal his wallet just for the hell of it, see how he likes it.”

“Good man.”

“I try to be.” He strummed the strings of his own guitar and smiled. “What brings you out this way?”

“Couldn't stay in my grave. Never did like staying in one place too long, there's just too much to see, too much to do… done a lot of wandering in my day, and you know I still haven't seen all there is to see of this part of the country. Lot of ground left uncovered.” He chuckled. “Heaven is awful nice, but sometimes you want to see the fog rolling off the mountains in the morning, or see the little green things poppin' up out of the ground in spring.”

“I hear you. How's any man supposed to want to stay in one place that long? I would have to go wandering, too, and God and all his angels couldn't stop me coming in or out.”

“When you get there, I'll tell you all the secret little paths between and beyond, if you don't already have 'em picked out from the start,” the ghost laughed. “A born wanderer has an eye for it, doesn't he?”

Elias laughed as well. “Say, do any of the angels up there play guitars, or do they mainly stick to harps and trumpets?”

“Son, you wouldn't believe how tired I am of hearin' trumpets. Another reason to go wandering.” He strummed his ghostly guitar, and it sounded just as good as it must have once upon a time, and the song coalesced into the familiar first few bars of an old hymn.

“To God be the glory, great things he has done, so loved he the world that he gave us his son, who yielded his life an atonement for sin, and opened the life-gate that all may go in…” Elias sang. 

“Or out, as the case may be—he don't seem to mind much if we go wandering a little while, long as we come back and see him.” His ghostly friend grinned as he continued the song. “Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the earth hear his voice, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, let the people rejoice…”

“…come to the Father through Jesus the son, give him the glory, great things he has done…”

They carried on singing hymns back and forth all through the night until the sun started coming up over the east side of the mountain—the first sunrise of spring, just as Elias wished to see it, and it took his breath away. Probably would have taken the stranger's breath away, too, if he still had any to take. He smiled, kind eyes glittering in the young golden sunlight, and once the sun had climbed over the mountain, he reluctantly got to his feet and made to brush his clothes off before he remembered that the leaves couldn't cling to his ghostly form.

“Well, I gotta be gettin' on now, before I'm missed too much. But I wonder if I could offer you some advice.”

“Sure you could.”

“You just keep walking towards the sun, and the shadow will fall behind you. And it will never catch up to you no matter how hard it tries to outpace you, as long as you keep walking in the light, with your back to the darkness. So don't pay the devil no mind, beyond taking back what he owes you.”

Elias bowed his head respectfully, and they shook hands as well as they could before the ghost strolled off again, singing to himself and playing his silver-stringed guitar.

And as the ethereal music faded away into the distance, Elias found himself missing Delilah all over again, his heart aching with a yawning emptiness where her song should have been; oh, she sang like an angel, and he missed every note. Had it really been six months since she had been stolen away? And another six months to go until the devil revisited to collect on his phony deal… it was hard to have patience sometimes, no matter how it would be ultimately rewarded, no matter how satisfying it would be to deliver his holy wrath and vengeance. Sometimes, even as he looked out onto the magnificent beauty of the world, it seemed a little hollow without her by his side, and sometimes he wondered if he would ever see her again. It was hard, not knowing. Just going on pure faith that they would make music together again someday.

But somewhere in that aching emptiness, in that loneliness, there was a little spark, a glimmer of hope that couldn't be extinguished, and that midnight spark would guide them home once more.

He strummed the strings of the old soldier, and true, he was no Delilah, but it was much like the voice of a good and loyal friend comforting the grieving, and it soothed Elias.

_Put a candle in the window, 'cause I feel I've got to move, though I'm going, going, I'll be coming home soon, long as I can see the light_… he sang to himself, low and solemn. _Pack my bag and let's get moving, 'cause I'm bound to drift awhile, when I'm gone, gone, you don't have to worry long, long as I can see the light_… 

Yes, it was hard to be patient. He missed his most loyal companion as he would have missed his own heart. But in the end, he reflected, all he had to do was find a way or make a way back to her. And a drifter's life was in finding all the secret ways and forging new paths, sharing the secret magic of the unseen world.

When he dreamed, in the shadows of the tall, tall trees, comfortable in his little earth-bed, he dreamed of silver guitar strings and golden harp strings, weaving together their heavenly music into the bright white sunrise clouds. Delilah rested easy in his arms, close and familiar, the way it should have been, and his heart was full and light once more, and so his song allowed him to walk on even the wispiest clouds. And all the hosts of heaven, from the lowliest messenger to the fieriest and fiercest seraph, smiled upon their perfect duet, for they were well pleased.

A rainy April was spent working on a cattle farm in West Virginia somewhere, and he chuckled when he remembered the red-haired man, Elliott, who had picked him up some months ago, telling him about how he went hunting for Mothman with his adventurous lady friend. Elias dedicated more than a couple of slow and boring evenings out in the pastures to looking to the sky for anything out of the ordinary, but he didn't find the Mothman, either; he did, however, see many shooting stars, and the abstract swirls and clouds of galaxies painted across the black cloth of eternity, and he was far more pleased by that. He was the only one around for miles, save for the cows mooing in the distance, and so it was like a secret for his eyes only.

May was bright and sunny, and spent wandering all up and down the east coast. He stood in the shallows of the Atlantic Ocean at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, singing a sunrise duet with the crashing waves all around him. Deep in the swamps of Florida, he hightailed it up a tree to avoid a particularly aggressive alligator down below, and he slept there for the night, camouflaged by the dangling Spanish moss. He played for pennies on what seemed like every street corner in New York City, from one end to the other, but his finest performance, if you asked him, was in the hidden vagabond city beneath the city, the one constructed of wet newspapers and weak cardboard boxes in the dirty alleyways and abandoned warehouses, the dirt beneath the glitter that no one cared to see. He sang for an audience of his fellow drifters as they dined on discarded and donated food, the outer leaves of lettuce and dented cans of cold soup and half-eaten sandwiches, and they cheered for him as if they were seeing Jimi Hendrix casting his spell over the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, instead of merely sitting in a scattered half-circle surrounding a man sitting on top of a trashcan with a guitar in his lap. Their lives were sad gray things, fragile and faded; most people did not care to see them, instead staring straight through them, and they became part of the background, as much as the fire escapes and the graffiti. And he lamented that he could not directly cure this ill… but when he saw the hope flickering to life in their eyes, when he saw the color flowing back into them, that was enough to set his heavy heart singing.

June, the month of happy weddings, saw him turning back towards the west with a great sorrow dragging behind him like a shadow. Oh, Delilah… well, never mind the shadow behind him, look to the sunlight in front of him. He took an entire day to appreciate the beauty of the roses blooming in Nashville's Music Garden. In particular he enjoyed the blended colors of the Coat of Many Colors—such vivid orange, such rich yellow!—and the Heart of Gold—it was like an entire sunset contained inside a single flower. And then there was the elegance of the pearly-pink Amazing Grace, and the bold burning red-orange of the Ring of Fire… he allowed himself to smile at each of them, pleased with their perfect prettiness, and thought that perhaps he should come back and play for the roses someday. He'd heard that music helped the flowers grow, after all, and he amused himself dreaming of what kind of beautiful things might grow from his music, and what kind of rose they might name after him. The Samson, a strong and sturdy rose, resilient against even the foulest weather, blooming a deep and kingly gold in late June.

_Someday_, he chuckled to himself.

Towards the middle of June, he went south and west, cutting through Alabama and Mississippi, then north through Arkansas and some of Texas, leaving a wise word in every ear and a song in every heart. And on the fourth of July, he found himself wandering through Amarillo again, wondering what became of the old woman whose name he never got.

He stood on a street corner to watch the parade go by, enjoying the marching bands and the roller derby girls, even a couple of competitive line-dancing teams, which he hadn't known existed before the moment he saw their proudly-flown banner ('BOMB CITY BOOT-SCOOTERS – STATE CHAMPIONS 2018 2015 2009 2008 2002 1999 1998 1995'—an impressive pedigree, to be sure). A radio station with a party cannon mounted on their van sprayed a mass of glitter and confetti all over his section of the crowd, and he would be rinsing glitter from his hair from here till Christmas, but the kids running around near his feet seemed to like it, and even picked it up from the ground to throw more at each other.

Near the end of the parade, a preteen kid handed him a little flag and a flier advertising the TRIUMPHANT RETURN of the Yellow Rose Community Theatre. Talent night! Rides! Games! Fireworks! Face-painting! Hotdog-eating contest! Live music! Well, he liked the sound of that. He smiled as he wandered towards the map dot indicated on the back of the flier.

The park was packed from one end to the other with people—children waving strands of tickets, eager to exchange them for little plastic treasures, couples wandering around arm in arm to observe the local arts and crafts on display, old men and women excitedly murmuring about how the good old days were here again, if just for a night. There were a couple of buskers lurking around here and there—one guy flailing on a set of bucket drums like a madman and playing an impressive John Bonham kind of solo, a teenage girl with a violin frowning in deep concentration as she played the Devil's Trill to an astonished and awed little crowd, a guy in a dark suit, hat, and sunglasses playing a wild blues harmonica as he danced to his own music. Elias tossed what few pennies he had into whatever they had set out to collect their coins. Good work deserved to be rewarded, after all, and he gave from the depths of his heart and his pockets.

With his last dollar, he treated himself to a ride on the Ferris wheel at the center of the festivities; the ride operator eyed the old soldier slung over his shoulder and opened his mouth to say something, then shrugged and let him carry it on anyway. Elias leaned back in his seat, guitar in his lap, breathing deep and peaceful, and started plucking the strings idly, not really playing a song, just painting a musical picture of the world around him, a masterpiece in silver. The seat above him was occupied by a couple of teenagers on a first date, awkwardly trying to talk their way into a clumsy first kiss, and the seat below him was occupied by a young mother and her child, who was excitedly pointing at the surrounding trees and trying to wave at everybody down on the ground, and there were so many people just milling about enjoying their day… some even waved back up at the delighted child. The sky was ablaze with a stunning, fiery sunset, slowly sinking down behind the city skyline, with the moon and the first star of night on the other side of the sky just waiting for its time to shine. The approaching night was warm, but not oppressively so, because there was a friendly little whisper of a breeze ruffling the floppy brim of his borrowed hat, and though it was hard to hear beyond the murmur of the crowds, if you were listening for it carefully enough, you could hear the rustling of the leaves on the trees and the distant cries of the insects and the night birds.

And he thought to himself, what a wonderful world.

When he hopped down out of his seat at the end of the ride, he wandered towards a little art show in a quieter corner of the park. The local schools had put it together, and he carefully observed each and every piece on display closely. A very impressive set of stick figures from the kindergarten. Interesting abstract triangles from some forward-thinker in fifth grade. An ambitiously detailed picture of some cartoon character fighting a fire-breathing dragon, from a dedicated dreamer in seventh grade. All of them had a great amount of heart and vision in them, and it pleased him to see such dreams committed to paper for all to see.

And at last he drifted towards the stage hidden by the overgrown trees, but they weren't so overgrown anymore; they had been trimmed back to a respectable distance, and the steps in the side of the hill leading down were much more even, ground down just a little bit so that no one could trip on them, which was a good thing, because the place was packed. Every inch of the log benches was filled, and there were quite a lot of people just standing around or sitting on the ground. He leaned against a tree to watch as the curtains opened to reveal some well-dressed men and women—the local government, celebrating the grand reopening of the Yellow Rose Community Theatre. The city had been there all these years, the city wasn't going anywhere, but somewhere along the way, they had lost the community. But here it was, the Fourth of July, and they were all united to celebrate.

“And,” the mayor continued, “this would not be possible without the dedication and vision of Mrs Anita Shaw. When we all forgot what a community was, she remembered, and she worked to rebuild it for years, damn the permits and regulations.” The crowd chuckled. “And her vision, her hard work, finally came to light, and we finally saw sense. I'm just sorry it took so long, Mrs Shaw. Come on up here, let's give her a round of applause.”

A teenage boy from the front row helped the old woman up the stairs to the stage. The mayor adjusted his microphone stand down so that she could speak into it, and she spluttered a few times, flustered by the attention, but she finally found her voice somewhere on the edge of her tears.

“I… I don't even know what to say,” she said. “I don't know if you were expecting a speech, but I didn't write one. All I can say is I'm proud beyond words at how this turned out, beyond my wildest dreams… I never thought I would see this again, as long as I lived.”

Her proud smile faltered as she looked out into the crowd, and he caught her eye, distinctive in his borrowed too-big scarf, with the old soldier slung over his shoulder, and a kind smile just visible beneath the low brim of his hat.

“I never thought I would see you again,” she said, almost as if to herself.

The crowd turned to each other, confused, muttering, wondering who she was talking to.

“Big, strong fella,” she croaked. “Big, strong fella up there at the back. I see you tryin' to hide.”

At last the crowd turned to look at him, and he grinned, perhaps a little sheepishly.

“Come down here, come on. I got a job for you.”

“Oh?”

He made his way down slowly, feeling dozens of curious eyes on him. Of course, he was used to commanding an entire room with his mere presence… entrancing people with music, capturing hearts with his words. But it wasn't often someone caught him by surprise and called him to the center of attention. It was something of a strange new sensation, though not an entirely unpleasant one. He walked up the stairs and crouched down to the level of the microphone.

“Hello,” he said.

“This is my angel,” Mrs Shaw said, patting his muscular arm. “Without him, none of this would have been possible. He listened to a crazy old woman, a crazy old has-been, and her boring stories about the good old days, and he didn't laugh at me once, except for at the funny parts.” He chuckled. “He appeared out of nowhere one day and disappeared the same day, but he took the time to listen, and he laid the groundwork for everything you see in front of you today. And you know, I can't think of no better opening act than this man.” She smiled up at him as he tried to hide his grin behind the rumpled scarf. “Go on, play us a song. Something for good luck.”

An eager murmur ran through the crowd. _Well, might as well give them what they want_, he thought, amused, as he unlatched his case. He hummed and strummed a few thoughtful bars, waiting for the old soldier to tell him what to play, and when he heard the song waiting deep in the green-dyed wood, he knew it was the right one, the perfect one, for it came out with a beautiful strength and clarity, as if the old soldier were proud to be playing it, and proud to be playing it for so many people on this day.

“As I went walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway, I saw below me that endless valley, this land was made for you and me…” He smiled as a few old-timers started to join in on that grand old song, Mrs Shaw included. “This land is your land, this land is my land, from California, to the New York island, from the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me…”

With each word it seemed like five more voices joined in, until it seemed like the entire world was singing along with him.

The final note dissipated into the deafening applause, the cries of 'encore, encore!' and he found he couldn't refuse them.

“Amarillo by morning, up from San Antone, everything that I got is just what I've got on…” he sang, low and heartfelt, and his voice was nearly drowned out by cheers. 

He laughed to himself just a little as he kept singing, and kept singing, and kept singing—they kept pleading for more as the sun sank down and down and down, and the great glittering roses of fire bloomed overhead as the fireworks show started. Amarillo by Morning, Copperhead Road, Heartland, Folsom Prison Blues, the Yellow Rose of Texas… he didn't want to hold up the next band forever, though he certainly could have, and his set would certainly be tough to top, but he had to be moving on at some point.

“Just one more,” he told the crowd as he tuned the old soldier. The old soldier hadn't seen this much action in years, but he was overjoyed to be doing what he was made for; you could feel it in his strings. “I can't stay forever—”

“Why not?” someone in the crowd shouted.

“Can't nail down a cloud and expect it to stay put,” he said. “Maybe it'll bring a thunderstorm, or maybe it'll shade the city on the hottest day of summer… but it has to keep moving so that it can find out where it's meant to be, what it's meant to do.” He strummed, satisfied that everything was at last back in tune, and smiled as he started his last song of the night. “To the east, to the east, the road beneath my feet, to the west, to the west, well I haven't got there yet, to the north, to the north, never to be caught, to the south, to the south, my time is running out…” This wasn't one that the crowd knew, but it was something of a country song in spirit, a psalm of the road, and the punk poet that wrote it spoke to his heart. “…so saddle up your horses and keep your powder dry, because the truth is you won't be here long, yeah, soon you're gonna die, to the heart, to the heart, there's no time for you to waste, and you won't find your precious answers by staying in one place, by giving up the chase…” And slowly he could see a reluctant understanding dawning on their faces; no, they couldn't keep him forever, as much as they wished they could. There was only one place that could keep him forever, and that was the road, unrolling forever out in front of him, into the distance and into the years ahead. “…I face the horizon everywhere that I go, I face the horizon, the horizon is my home…”

The final note rang into the night and he tipped his borrowed floppy hat at the wild crowd before turning to Mrs Shaw.

“Will we see you again?” she croaked, teary-eyed.

“Maybe. You never know. And neither do I, truth be told. Just keep your eyes to the sky, and an ear to the ground.” He smiled and shouldered the old soldier, then leaned down to give her a one-armed hug. “Good night, Mrs Shaw.”

“Good night, big, strong fella.”

She threw her arms around his neck, and he chuckled warmly as he felt the faded strength that she'd bragged about the first time they spoke.

And he drifted away with the moonset, disappearing into the dark and lovely desert night down a ribbon of highway that flickered silver with the heat.

August was spent painting in the Rockies; he purchased an easel, a canvas, and some paint at a craft supply store somewhere in Denver, and he wandered until he found his subject deep in the mountains, opting to sketch and paint a little bighorn lamb delicately nibbling on some fresh and tender wildflowers that were taller than it was. When he wasn't painting, he enjoyed the bounty of nature, the fish from the rivers and the berries from the bushes hidden back in the forest. 

And on one memorable occasion, he slept on a bed of bluebonnets out in the open and woke, just briefly, to find a monstrous gray wolf lying down nearby, docile as a dog, as if it were keeping watch.  
And when he dreamed, he dreamed of the wolf, merely a puppy compared to the monstrous might of the devil before him, but the wolf bravely snarled and sank its long white fangs into the devil's thieving hands anyway, ignoring the sour and poisonous taste of sulfur and the fire and smoke hissing from the wound.

When he came down off the mountain, he went down a completely different trail, and he left the painting with a park ranger in a little log-cabin museum at the trailhead. The ranger was confused, but after studying it for a moment, he hung it up on the wall in a place of honor, and there it stayed for many years afterward.

September saw him wandering around somewhere around the border of California and Nevada, and though he wasn't trying to thumb down a ride at the time, a familiar-looking beat-up green pickup truck slowed down and stopped at the side of the road a couple hundred feet in front of him. Last time, there had been a mountain of furniture and junk in it, but someone had cleaned it out and put a cap on it; the cap's color didn't match the truck's, and he was amused to note some of the bumper stickers on the tailgate. A little green alien flashing a peace sign. 'Not all who wander are lost,' above a pair of hiking boots. 'Happy camper,' surrounding a little campfire. 'Bigfoot Research Unit.' A peace sign, a heart, and the silhouette of a cat. The driver flashed the lights to signal him, and then there was a cheerful honk of the horn to follow.

This time, though, a woman leaned out of the passenger side of the cab, eagerly waving at him as he approached.

“Come on, come on! Hustle, Logan, hustle!” she called.

He took a few jogging steps, which seemed to please her. She withdrew back into the cab, still watched over by all the wiggling little sunflower figurines (and the one lone flamingo), maybe even more of them than the last time, and Elias leaned on the frame of the window to grin at Elliott.

“Small world,” he said.

“I wondered if that was you wandering around,” the red-haired man laughed. “I wasn't sure, because how unlikely is that? That would just be weird. Like a one-in-a-bazillion chance. But she insisted we stop just in case it was you.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, still all nervous energy. “She liked the story, so she told me, 'you gotta pick this guy up, it might be him!' And what do you know?”

“Well, don't just let him stand there baking in the sun, Elli! He's gotta be all wore out from walking. Hop in.” She motioned for him to move away from the truck door so that she could open it, and he glanced down at her hand to see a little ring glittering on her littlest finger in the bright white sunlight.

“It'll be a little bit of a squeeze, with so little space, and with the guitar…” he pointed out.

“I'll jump out and ride in the truck bed, as long as you don't tell the cops I'm in there,” she offered, and even Elias wasn't sure how serious she was, between the teasing tone of her voice and her utterly straight face.

“Why don't I ride in the back?” he offered with a chuckle.

That seemed agreeable, so he climbed in the back, atop a pile of soft blankets and pillows in the corner, and he breathed a long sigh of relief; he never realized how much he missed soft blankets until he'd spent a long stretch sleeping on scratchy leaves or on the cold, hard ground. Nothing like going without to teach you a little humility, a little gratitude. The woman opened the little middle window at the back of the truck's cab and pointed out a little cooler on the other side of the bed—they'd eaten all their food while they were out camping, but he was welcome to drink anything he found in there. He thanked her politely before rummaging through the ice to find a bottle of water, which he sipped slowly and carefully. No use making himself sick by gulping it down greedily, especially not when he was a guest of such gracious hosts.

“So this is the guy!” she said excitedly.

“And this is the girl?” Elias laughed.

“Yes and yes,” Elliott chuckled, a little flustered, grinning in the rearview mirror. “Logan, this is Violet, Violet, this is Logan.”

“Pleased to meet you,” he said politely.

“Not half as pleased as me, I bet! He told me about you, while we were out at the Roswell UFO Mcdonald's, and it was like a ghost story, and I like a good ghost story! I've always hoped I could see you sometime. Looks like today is our lucky day!”

As his hosts chattered excitedly, he found himself getting drowsy from how comfortable and peaceful it was—even if it was only the hard-ridged bed of an old truck, with some blankets and pillows and a couple of duffel bags full of other stuff tossed in there, it still struck him as strangely homey, as if this were a place that was beloved. Well, a home was a home, he supposed, wherever it might have been—trailer, mansion, truck bed, highway—as long as it was surrounded in love. There was rarely ever a roof over his head for long, but he always had Delilah, he had the sun and the moon and the stars, and he had a song inside of him, and with those things he loved so dearly, wherever he went, he was home. He smiled sleepily as he listened to Elliott and Violet playing a strange guessing game up front—or, at the very least, Violet gamely trying to explain the rules.

“So what's a man and what's a monster?”

“Awful philosophical of you to ask, Elli,” she joked.

“I mean, like, if I want you to guess Spiderman, is he a man or a monster?”

“Monster, because he's fictional. If you pick, say, your dad, then it's 'man' because he's real, but if it's Spiderman, he's a monster.”

“But Spiderman is a good guy.”

“If he's made-up, he's a monster in this game. Look, man, I didn't make the rules, this is just what they taught us on the farm.”

“What if I pick Bigfoot? Is Bigfoot a man or a monster?”

There was a long, thoughtful silence as she pondered the question, and Elias never did learn the answer, because he drifted off to sleep at some point, dreaming once more of the ghost of Delilah, and an endless cascade of shooting stars in the dark desert skies, and of becoming the night wind itself.

Eventually he woke up again, because the truck stopped and the tailgate opened with an unholy rusty screech.

“Sorry about that,” Elliott apologized.

“Is everything all right?” Elias asked.

“Yeah, yeah, we're just stopping for some lunch,” Violet said. “Come on, we'll get you something to eat.”

“I couldn't—”

“Our paths had to cross for a reason!” she interrupted, putting her hands on her hips. “It would have to be a pretty damn big coincidence for Elli to just randomly stumble on the same hitchhiker months and months later on a completely different road in a completely different state. So obviously, it was meant to be.”

“Don't argue with her, Logan—she may be half your size, but she'll fight you and she'll win every time,” Elliott laughed, clapping her on the shoulder affectionately and planting a kiss on top of her head.

“Yeah! Look out, I'm all feisty and stuff.” She swung a couple of impressive-looking hooks and uppercuts at the air.

“Besides, uh—I guess I… might kind of owe you one?” Elliott mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck a little. Elias' eyes flicked between the little ring on Violet's finger and Elliott's sheepish face, and he smiled slowly, and perhaps slightly smugly.

“All right, all right, you got me,” Elias laughed. “I'll go.” He slipped out of the truck bed, and neither of them said anything about him carrying the old soldier with him into the diner; he just didn't like the idea of leaving him out in the open, unprotected, where anybody could have snatched him away, and robbed him of his chance to beat the devil. The waitress looked at him a little oddly, but his hosts didn't seem to mind one bit. “So, Violet,” he started conversationally, “that's a pretty ring you've got there. May I ask what kind of stone it is?”

He leveled his gaze at Elliott and took a long sip of strong coffee.

“Oh, this—” She giggled as she held out her hand for Elias to examine. “This is just plastic! But I don't mind, because—oh, man, you'll never believe this.”

“Tell me anyway,” he said. “I like a good story.”

“And it's a hell of a story,” Elliott said, ruffling his own shaggy red hair with a sheepish grin.

“So it's my birthday in May, right, and he calls me up out of the blue like, 'happy birthday, we're going to Scotland, surprise.' And that's cool, because I've never been overseas before, only to Canada a couple times. And really, I don't know a lot about Scotland—which is probably a shame to my Scottish ancestors. I like bagpipes, though.”

“And you liked that haggis we had.”

“Yeah, that was good,” she agreed. “So I don't know why he picked Scotland, but I like an adventure.”

“So he's said,” Elias chuckled. His eyes were still glued to Elliott, who seemed to be getting more flustered by the moment, fussing with his hair and shredding the paper napkin his silverware had been wrapped in—much to the annoyance of the waitress, who brought a fistful of new napkins and put them down with a glare and without a word—and flipping the menu over and over.

“And he takes me around to all these places—well, first, we go to that haggis place, that was the first adventure, and both of us were pretty nervous about trying it, but as it turns out, pretty good. But he takes me around to all these fields and woods, and he's joking, 'oh, you know, Scotland is full of fairies and ghosts and stuff, we gotta look out for them.'”

“And did you see any fairies and ghosts and stuff?” Elias asked. She shook her head. “Hmm. You know, seems to me… it almost seems like he was just looking for an excuse to spend time alone with you.” Violet grinned as she gently placed her hands over Elliott's ears and drew him close in a hug.

“Shhh. Don't tell him that, he'll catch on to my brilliant scheme and it will all be ruined!”

“What?” Elliott said, comically loud.

“Nothin', Elli. Eat your toast.” She kissed him on the cheek and patted his face lovingly before she continued her story. “And I don't know nothin' about Scotland, like I said, so he's just taking me places I don't recognize right off the top of my head, and we get to this little ruined… castle, fortress, kinda thing on the shore of a beautiful lake.”

“I was afraid she'd catch on, because she's so smart. I mean, we're in Scotland, we're near a lake, I thought sure she'd already put it together and was just kinda humoring my dumb plans.” He hid his smile behind the heel of his hand as Elias rested his chin on his own hand. “So we climb over the stone walls of this fortress-castle-thing while no one's looking, and we go to stand on the edge of Loch Ness, and she's just excitedly taking pictures of the lake because she likes nature and stuff…”

“And it was so atmospheric, there was this fog rolling in off the lake, it was like we were lost in another world,” she said.

“Oh, I know that feeling all too well,” Elias said. “Waking up in the morning and being lost in a low-lying cloud; it's like walking somewhere halfway between the land of dreams and the world of the waking. Otherworldly.”

She nodded eagerly as she gazed down at her hand, eyes glittering. “And I'm just looking at the fog on the lake and how pretty it is, and I'm just rambling about it, and not thinking about why he's taken us somewhere quiet away from everybody else. And then I hear this big gross squelch in the mud behind me so I turn around and…”

“And?” Elias smirked, just a little, as Elliott pulled his baseball cap down to hide his face, though he couldn't hide that big, toothy grin.

“And he has this ring in his hand, and he asks me—” She giggled, face going pink as she remembered. “First he says, 'well, look, this trip was expensive, so I got this ring out of the machine at the corner store, it'll have to do,' and then he says, 'I know you how you like going on adventures, so how about we make our life one big adventure, together?'” She beamed brightly and brushed her fingers over the ring with a great fondness. “It's only plastic, but it's worth the entire world to me.”

“What a sweet story,” Elias said, “but I don't know why you told me it was so unbelievable. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Maybe slightly eccentric, or off-beat, but perfectly true to the way that you are.”

“That's the thing,” Elliott laughed. “While she was standing there staring at me, and I was so scared she was gonna say 'no,' there's this big splash in the lake, and we think someone's thrown a huge rock in there, until we hear this noise, like this… weird chattery noise, and it's hissing like steam, and the fog clears around it, just a little bit…”

“Are you trying to tell me you saw the Loch Ness Monster, Elliott?” he asked, amused. Not that he doubted Elliott at all, mind you. He could tell that the man doubted him when he told him a vision of the future so many months ago; after all, no one ever believed him when he so plainly told them that he never lied and was never wrong. People often took him for smug, but he wasn't. He was merely an honest man in a world built of lies and half-truths.

Though he would have been lying if he said he didn't enjoy seeing the weight of the truth settle in on someone else's face.

“We tried to get a picture of it, but all I have is a picture of its tail going back under the water!” Violet brought up the image on her phone, and Elias looked at it closely, and it was undoubtedly something huge and scaly, and something that probably shouldn't have been living in a little lake in bonny Scotland. “And we can't tell anybody else about it because no one would ever believe us! They'd think we were crazy.”

“Well, for what it's worth… I know the truth when I see it.” He smiled. “I see the truth in your hearts, and I see true love between the two of you. You're going to live blessed lives.”

“I hope so,” Violet said excitedly, putting her hand on top of Elliott's and lacing their fingers together.

“I never lie, and I'm never wrong. Just ask him.” Elias grinned broadly at the indescribably flustered man, whose face was just about as red as his hair now. Okay, so perhaps he was slightly smug, but it wasn't like it was his fault no one ever believed him when he said true things.

“Actually, I wanted to ask you something, Logan,” she said. She thoughtfully stirred her iced tea with a long spoon, raised it to let a few drops drip off of it, and went back to stirring it.

“Oh?”

“I wanted to know if there was any way we could convince you to play at our wedding.”

He blinked, speechless for a moment.

“I mean, we're not rich, so we couldn't pay you a ton, but we could pay you some, and you'd have all the free food you could eat, and I would gladly kick my mother off the fold-out couch so you could sleep there instead.”

“And, you know…” Elliott started. He tapped his fingers on the table as he tried to compose his thoughts. “You know, she said earlier, our paths probably crossed again for a reason, right? It's too big a completely random coincidence, it feels like it's something else. Fate, or whatever, I dunno. Fate was the reason, but not the meaning. I think we have to make it mean something on our own. And this is what we want it to mean.”

Elias nodded thoughtfully. The guy had a tendency to ramble a little, or talk in circles, but he seemed to know things, true things, good things. “I still have a little wandering left to do, but I would be honored.” He smiled. “Thank you.”

By the time of the wedding, he would have Delilah again, and he could think of no better way to bless their union than with her at his side, and with their benediction, Elliott and Violet would go on to live utterly blessed lives full of adventures big and small alike, from hunting for lake monsters to walking to the corner store hand in hand to buy bread and milk.

They chattered excitedly about their recent Bigfoot hunt out in Willow Creek—which sounded like an excuse to go exploring nature more than anything else, because Violet seemed far more impressed by the sheer variety of moss and mushrooms that she had seen in the woods than by anything else—and eagerly listened to Elias' stories about halfheartedly searching for the Mothman out in West Virginia, and at the end of the meal, Violet insisted on ordering him another plate of food to go, even after he had wolfed down his plate of eggs, bacon, and toast, and slyly sneaked some of the leftover food off of their plates. But nothing escaped her eagle eye, so she insisted and insisted, and she didn't budge an inch when Elias tried to refuse the favor.

He didn't budge an inch, though, when Elliott invited him to climb back into the truck. “We'll take you wherever you need to go, man. Wherever you want. Pick a place on the map and let's go.”

But he needed to feel the earth beneath his feet, the sun on his back, and the wind in his hair.

A little rest was nice, but there were too many places he had to be, too many things still left to do. It would have been all too easy to lie down, to stop, to sleep, to give in to the loneliness aching in the pit of his heart, to lose himself, to become a hollow man forever trying to fill the yawning, bottomless void within, to pour blood and whiskey into the ragged monster gazing at him from the other side of the abyss, hoping to quiet its howling.

All too easy.

And that was why he had to keep moving.

For the secret was all in walking—in moving forward. Taking the back roads and the secret paths and blazing new ones when he tired of following what was already so well-trod. He would walk over mountains and deserts, and even over the wind and the waves, and the devil would never even catch the edge of his lace scarf for a second, for the darkness could not keep pace with him, and fell behind him for as long as he kept walking onward.

A happy ending could not arrive in the middle of the story, and he could not stop walking simply because he was a little lonely and a little hungry and a little tired; Delilah was still clutched in the devil's thieving hands, and he could not rest until she was home once more.

“I'm still searching for something beyond that horizon—there's someone there waiting for me, close as my heartbeat and far away as my dreams… and I can't keep her waiting,” Elias said, voice soft and reverent, and Violet nodded reluctantly. She seemed to understand. But she did insist on giving him a formal invitation to the wedding, tucked away in a cute, flowery purple envelope, and told him not to lose it, since he presumably didn't have a forwarding address.

“Just whisper into the west wind when the time is right,” he said. “I'll hear, and I'll be there with the sunrise.” 

She laughed, thinking he was joking—wouldn't _she_ be surprised—and Elliott hugged him and clapped him on the back. “You're really something, Logan,” he said warmly. “Thank you.”

As Elias watched the two drive away, disappearing in the direction of the heat-haze hallucination that was Las Vegas, he reflected that he was blessed by this meeting, just as much as they had been blessed by meeting him. Typically he never saw the same faces twice; he merely wandered off into the sunset singing his song, knowing that he had touched a singular life for the better… but he rarely ever thought about all those other people, all those people he never even met, like Violet, like the hundreds of people who had cheered for him in Amarillo. How word must have traveled! How stories sprang up in his footsteps! It was strange to think that the ghost of him lingered all over the world, in the hearts of a million people who he had never even met… strange, and surprisingly humbling.

And with that many people following in his footsteps… well, the devil didn't have a chance in hell against him.

Come October, he drifted back to Flagstaff; though it was bitterly cold, and the air itself seemed to crackle like breaking ice, it had not yet snowed this year, and he was grateful for small favors.  
He walked in to the empty hostel with no fanfare, wondering briefly if he would even see the two women who had loaned him his now-battered disguise. Of course he was a man of his word and he wanted to return the hat and scarf, but what if they had moved on? Lots of things could happen in a year. He quickly found that his worries were unfounded; there was no one at the desk when he came in, but when the plain-looking woman who had loaned him the scarf appeared around the corner with a basket of clean bedsheets to iron and fold, she dropped the basket on the floor and jogged the next few steps to greet him, as if he were an errant king returned to his shining kingdom at last. She asked him a dozen questions all at once and never once requested the return of her scarf; she just wanted to know what he had been up to, could he tell her some stories from the road, what did he see, what did he see?

“It's silly, I guess, but I been praying for you all this time, like I said—I was joking at first, when you left, but it became habit,” she confessed. “I had a dream about you the other night, too.”

“Oh?”

“You were on top of Mount Elden, singing to thousands of people all sitting in the trees and on the ground, kinda like the Sermon on the Mount, except with more cool guitar riffs.” She air-guitared for a moment to illustrate the point. “But your guitar was different. It wasn't this one.” She motioned to the old soldier. “In that dream it was made of dark wood, and it was so pretty. This one looks nice, too, I like the green swirls, but there was something…” She gestured vaguely, frowning as she tried to figure out a word. “Something… magical, maybe? about it… no, her. Something holy.” She laughed, like steam hissing from a broken pipe. “Dreams are weird, right?”

“Right.” He smiled. “I believe I have something of yours.”

“Right! I been staring at you all this time and yet I totally forgot about that!”

Well, that wasn't unexpected; a lot of people were awed and humbled by being in the presence of Elias, so he didn't blame her one bit.

He chuckled as he unwrapped the scarf from around his neck and folded it into a soft, fluffy cube for her. “I tried to clean it the best I could, but there might be a little bit of road dirt still ground into it.”

“Oh, that's okay,” she said cheerfully. “It's like a souvenir. I can't go to all those cool places I used to dream about, but my scarf has, and that's something. It's like… keeping the dream alive, I guess.”

“In that case, I'm honored.” He smiled and took the hat off carefully. “Is the other lady still here? I would like to return this to her as well.”

“Yeah, she's still around, it's just her day off.”

“I see.” He placed the hat on the front desk. “Can I trust you to make sure that this makes its way back to her?”

“Of course!” she said brightly. “Do you need a room? She usually does all the paperwork and stuff, and I can't never make sense of it, but you're welcome to take a room, put your feet up, watch some TV, whatever.”

He considered refusing her charity. It was something of a point of pride, a way to remind him of his mission, of himself. The work continued, the words were spoken, the truth was revealed, and at the end of all things, he stood alone, with only Delilah for company… but the truth was that he would need all his strength to beat the devil, and drifting through the world of the living like a bedraggled ghost would do him no favors. Time to tune up the old soldier, make sure he was prepared to seize his victory. 

So Elias thanked the woman, who smiled brightly and went back to collecting the laundry that she had scattered across the floor in her excitement.

He sat down on one of the mismatched couches in the front room, lounging like a king on his throne, and started to play. It sounded like an idle warmup, but even a simple warmup had to mean something, and it meant something to the woman, who beamed with delight when she realized what he was just beginning to play. It was such a simple song, it would have been beneath most buskers, or even teenagers learning to play for the first time. Drop a guitar down a flight of stairs and it would play Gloria on the way down, some writer had once said. But she applauded him as if Van Morrison himself had dropped in to play for her personally, with just a hint of a tear in her eye.

After she stepped into the TV room to fold the bedsheets, he began tuning the old soldier anew and polishing him with the rag in his back pocket. He patted the shining green-streaked wood as if he were patting the neck of a mighty warhorse charging into its last battle with its tired old head held high. And it would be the old soldier's last battle—of that, he was certain. But his end would be glorious, honorable, befitting of such a proud old thing. Much better than languishing in the dusty corner of an old pawn shop forever. And he had been glad of the old soldier's loyal, dutiful company; he wasn't Delilah, no one and nothing could quite measure up to her, but he was a damn good friend in her absence, and Elias was proud to have walked with him to the end of his long and winding road.

The next morning, he left before dawn, feeling like a new man, and perhaps he was; no one was ever really the same at the end of a long journey as they were at the start of it. No matter how far he roamed, no matter how long he walked, there was always something exciting about the future; how would he change, what would he learn, where would he go next? There was no way of knowing for certain. The thrill was in finding out.

And what he had found out was that the devil could not touch him.

Never could.

Elias had cast off his disguise hundreds of miles behind him and he was walking as himself once more. Though he was draped in ragged old lace and there were holes in his tattered jeans, there was something regal about him, almost otherworldly. The world around him held its breath as he passed through, as if he were an angel sent to pour out his holy wrath; the moon froze high in the sky, too distracted to walk its regular path, and the wind was still and flat, afraid of the fury in his pale eyes, and the entire painted desert was silent for miles around, though whether it was fear or awe, I could not say.

But the night only dared to continue once it was far behind him.

The only other living thing in the truck stop chapel was a cockroach that crawled up on top of a folding chair, twitched its little feelers, and nervously skittered back to the dark corner that it had come from—the same corner that Elias had carelessly pitched the devil's quarter in a year ago today. The burnt-out neon cross hung at an angle, having come unstuck from its place on the cracked drywall, and the baptismal font beneath was bone-dry; it had once served as a home for a nest of spiders, but even the spiders had long since moved on from it, leaving a dust-clogged cobweb as the only evidence of their existence. Jagged black shadows crawled across the room like monstrous junkyard dogs, grinning with teeth like daggers, eager to rip apart the first poor lost soul that stumbled inside, and somewhere, somewhere amid the scattered husks of insects and the dust-covered cobwebs swallowing the half-rotten bibles, their master waited, a wisp of black smoke hidden in the shadow.  
But the shadows shrank back, hiding away in the corner in fear, and he could not hide any longer.

The old soldier spoke to him for the last time, strong and brave and defiant to the end, and Elias smirked as he started playing to the terrified shadows trying so desperately to escape.

“You can run on for a long time, run on for a long time, run on for a long time, sooner or later God'll cut you down, sooner or later God'll cut you down…”

Deep in the darkness he could hear the devil's dead and hollow heart pounding in terror, the perfect percussion to underscore the blessed silver music spilling from the strings.

“Go tell that long-tongue liar, go and tell that midnight rider, tell the rambler, the gambler, the back-biter, tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down, tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down, tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down…”

The devil was backed into the corner like a bird caught in a chimney uselessly beating its wings against its confinement, disbelieving and furious and frightened all at once.

“What's wrong?” Elias asked as the last silver note dissipated into the darkness. “You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“You—” the devil rasped.

“Me.” He smirked. “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

The devil cleared his throat, seeming slightly more at ease; he played it off like he was emboldened, but in the deathly silence of the abandoned chapel, Elias could hear his hollow heartbeat, a drum pounding out a signal of alarm. “I believe you have something that belongs to me. Perhaps we can come to an exchange, as I think we are reasonable men.”

“Oh? Do you think so?”

“You promised me your soul, and surely that is worth Delilah's safe return.” There was a crack like a whip scoring flesh hard enough to draw blood, and the stench of sulfur and burning dust, and Delilah was suddenly there, clutched in the devil's thieving hands.

But Elias merely laughed.

“There really is no one easier to fool than the devil,” he said. “When did I ever promise you my soul? Tell me that.”

“A year ago, we stood in this place, and I made my offer. I told you that if you came back to me at the end of the year, and if you never despaired of toiling in filth and loneliness, that I could make your dreams come true. I told you you could have the world for your soul. And you nodded your head—am I to believe that the Living Truth is nothing but a common liar?”

“I never promised you my soul,” Elias said simply. “You asked for Logan Shulo's soul, and that was what I promised you. And you're certainly welcome to it… but you may as well try to put a name to the wind. My soul is mine, and mine alone. You never had any claim to it at all.”

Oh, that just burned the devil up. His human disguise flaked away like ash from a burning log, peeling away piece by piece, and the blue stench of brimstone was overwhelming in the shadow of the little abandoned chapel, in the strange ghost-world somewhere between Heaven and Hell and Earth. And Delilah was still clutched in the devil's long and spindly claws, but such wicked hellfire could not touch something so good and pure. The devil shrieked an unholy sound, like broken glass and screaming children, boiling blood and burning flesh.

But Elias was fearless, even in the face of the prince of all lies, a terror from out of time towering over him, breathing toxic smoke and belching blue sulfurous flame.

“All right. Just remember, I tried asking nicely.”

He choked up on the neck of the old soldier like a baseball bat and swung with all his ferocious strength, and the six silver strings, delicate and glittering like moonlight, burned the devil like acid. The beast shrieked and clawed at the wound, bleeding fire and smoke; loose little embers flew and skittered across the floor, hot enough to melt the linoleum tile and the steel chairs on which they landed. Delilah skidded down the aisle toward the door; she would be a little scratched and scuffed afterward, but she was otherwise safe, and he breathed a half a sigh of relief before swinging the old soldier again. The sound of the silver strings was holy to him and hellish to the devil; the sound, to him, of sweet vengeance, and the sound, to the devil, of his defeat.

And by the time the devil slunk away into the embrace of the scattered shadows and the dusty cobwebs, by the time his infernal ashes were scattered on the wind, finally admitting his ruin at the hands of a greater force, the sturdy old Wildwood, who had seen him so loyally through the past year, was nothing but splinters and char and curled silver strings strewn across the floor of the abandoned chapel.  
The old soldier died in glorious battle for a righteous cause. Elias reverently touched the green-streaked wood and gathered every piece he could find back into the worn old case. Once he was satisfied that every piece had been accounted for, he latched the case shut and put Delilah on his shoulder—oh, the weight was steady and so familiar and so welcome, having been so sorely missed—as he walked out into the real world once more, leaving the devil and his false shadow-world far behind where it belonged.

And there was something lighter and brighter about the abandoned chapel, now that the devil had been chased out; the cobwebs were still clinging to every surface, and the cross was burnt out and hanging at a careless angle, but there was something about it that shined like the great golden truth. The cobwebs would be cleared away and the chairs rearranged and the gaudy neon cross replaced with simple but sturdy solid wood, and someday, people would come in to pray again. They would feel seen and heard, in that strange way that happens when one prays in wild or abandoned places—high mountains and empty fields and lost highways—and they would feel the truth, deep down in their souls… that they were not alone as they continued on their journey. That there was someone walking with them.

In the shadow of a hill behind the truck stop, Elias dug a grave for the old soldier. It wasn't very deep, as the desert sand was packed hard and he was scraping at it with his bare hands, but he did his best, and he opened the case again to arrange the pieces of the Wildwood back into an approximate guitar shape, trying to match up the green streaks and the grains in the splintered wood. It was tedious work, but sometime around sunset, he nodded, satisfied, and latched the case shut again. He lowered it down into the grave ever so gently and covered it with all the red sand; after a moment's thought, he found some rocks and arranged them in a somewhat clumsy cairn on top of it.

“Here lies a good and loyal friend,” he said aloud. “I was always grateful for your company, and all you did to see me through it. Especially that last bit at the end. I'm glad to have been part of your story. Thank you.”

He pressed a hand to the ground reverently as he looked up at the stars, and a silver streak of cold fire scratched its trail across the sky, disappearing somewhere beyond the moon. He smiled as he rose to his feet and dusted off the desert sands clinging to the lace scarves. Someday he would drift back this way just to visit; of course it was important to move forward, but sometimes, it was worth it to circle back and remember what had brought you that far on your journey, and he would remember the old soldier and Amarillo and the train across the prairie, and so much more, for all the ages of the world.

But that chapter of the story was finished for the time being, and it was time to write a new one.

He cradled Delilah in his arms, feeling well and truly right again, as though the very universe had settled back into its proper order once more. The stars were glimmering merrily overhead, the night-birds were singing their secret songs, and the wind was humming along. 

He looked around him, and saw that it was good.

Everything was as it should be, and everything where it should have been.

Elias started to sing as he went along, weaving together that perfect magic with Delilah; oh, he had missed her terribly, but if anything, it sounded like she missed him even more, suffering under a year languishing in the devil's shadow, the devil, who could not create, only mimic, and often poorly. She had been robbed of her voice for so long, and that was a tragedy and a sin. But she sang beautifully for Elias, glad to be free, and he sang for her, glad to be together once again.

“…you know I love you, baby, more than the whole wide world… you are my woman, you know you are my pearl, let's go out past the party lights, where we can finally be alone… come with me and we can take the long way home… come with me, together, we can take the long way home… come with me, together, we can take the long way home…”

And together, they walked over the horizon and into the next story.

**Author's Note:**

> A playlist to enjoy featuring every song mentioned or sung in the story: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGnFD7B5oaTo95zWNh4pdMgTeqUmNq8X4


End file.
